Over the past 18 months Auckland theatre goers seem to have fallen into the grip of a Beckett craze – an appetite that might initially have been stimulated by envy at the rapturous reports from Wellington on Ian McKellen’s performance in Waiting for Godot.

Whatever the case may be, there has recently been a steady stream of local productions of the lesser-know plays, and now the internationally acclaimed Gare St Lazare Players are serving up intriguing adaptations of a couple of Beckett’s more obscure prose works. 

The End gently seduces the audience into connecting with the experience of a world-weary narrator set on withdrawing from any kind of engagement with the world. [More]
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Two black pews, one short one a bit longer, lie parallel to the left of a scuffed black stage.   Up from the front row jumps an emaciated looking bald man in a close-fitting black woollen sweater, black pants and old looking but shiny red-brown shoes. Pausing briefly to regard our presence he launches into a frank verbal presentation, no introduction or preamble, as though we’d come in late, near the end of his whole life’s story.

Discharged from an unspecific care facility after an unspecified length of stay with nothing but a single set of a dead man’s clothes and a modest sum of money, the aging and ailing fellow is left to fend for himself in a world he tells us has changed considerably since he last lived in it. 

At first holing up at a boarding house, he’s soon conned out of his meagre finances and sent packing, reduced to begging and eventually finding shelter in an old shit-littered shed. The frequently downright revolting details of this pathetic man’s listless ordeal are delivered in such endearingly poetic terms as to render them beautiful; decaying flowers, farts and all. 

Playing alternate sessions to First Love – the Gare St Lazare Players’ other theatrical translation of one of Beckett’s thirteen Texts For Nothing, written between 1950 and 1952 – The End could almost be a sequel but for the subtle difference in their characters; the antihero of First Love is a qualified misanthropist, whereas this protagonist is a victim, ready for death but persevering with his wholly deficient life with an air of philosophical acceptance. 

Again, the transformation from text to stage is an impressive one. When reading Beckett I’m inclined to imagine the deep intonations of Richard Burton or the like, whereas Conor Lovett’s lighter pitch and extensive tonal range generate a totally believable sense of frank spontaneity.
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